Hi, I made a quick search on the forum and didnt find it.
A nice feature would be having the streets speeds all the time on the client map. I dont know if this is a bug, but when I report a traffic jam, only sometimes the speeds appear, and the worst: the traffic jam seems to be reported just for that little road segment between the 2 knots. Some traffic jams are very long and that mislead any traffic jam information while doing routes. We also cannot see when the traffic jam stops.
If waze could grab every user speed even without the traffic jam and plot on the map, would help us a lot by knowing that the speed average there is good.
We also could have some troubles if it works like that. For example, if someone stops on a store without parking lot, waze could think that he has slow speed and plot wrong speed info on clients. Waze could then popup a message asking if he is in a traffic jam (i think it already does that, but just for reports).
Other way to solve it could be to just plot speeds on “Primary streets”, “freeways” and “highways”.
Waze could also have 2 modes: The actual one and this new one.
The segment speed could be changed only if other waze passes thru there to update road speed or after a time limit of 1h or 2h. (It could plot a greyed-red to show us that it was slow 2 hours ago, same for green).
Another problem could be the 2 way roads. how to plot both speeds? If both are good, plain green. Only one way, how its plotted nowadays. If one is fast other slow, I think half arrows could move each direction in respective color. I dont know if this could make you feel dizzy. But these are only few ideas.
Ideas aside:
The thing is, waze could still work as it does now, but it should show us better where the traffic jams goes to. Not just on that segment.
Sorry if something is not good explained. I didnt read it again before sending.
Waze absolutely does show the traffic jam speed with their automated traffic jam algorithms. When a Wazer is in traffic their actual speed is being sent back to Waze. After Waze processes the data and the client updates the data, the jam will show on the display and that data will be used for other Wazers who are on-route and calculating routes in the vicinity.
Yes, there are also false traffic jams generated by Wazers who are running the application and not travelling with the other cars on the road that they are snapped to (stopped for gas, drive-thru, etc). Yes, Waze should filter this data out better. In the meantime, turn off Waze when you are not driving with traffic to avoid your Waze client sending false data back to Waze.
The manual traffic reporting helps Waze to ensure that an automated jam is generated on the segment. But the manual report itself does not include the data that is needed to update the speed of the traffic jam and the manual report itself is not considered for routing purposes. So yes, report traffic via a report so that Waze knows that there is traffic there and will create a jam on that segment shortly afterwards.
Waze has no idea how long the traffic jam is until a Wazer drives through it. The Waze traffic jam data is community generated by Wazers driving. No Wazers = no traffic jams in the client.
As you noticed, Waze currently does not have a visual display for no traffic (green) like some other solutions have. They only show the slow downs. So it is difficult to know if a road with no jam is actually jam free or whether Waze just doesn’t have up to date data. The more Wazers in your area = more accurate jams. I do not think that Waze should add a green traffic indicator on the roads unless the data is current. A suggestion would be to show the road as green if a Wazer has driven the segment less than maybe 10 minutes ago. Otherwise the segment should not have any traffic color coded indicator. Many of the other navigation solutions that show the roads as green are either tied into the in-road sensors which offer constant up to date information or have many more data points to update their traffic displays.
Per Waze - their solution can show traffic on any road, not only freeways, highways and primary roads. But you are correct, there is a lot of false jam data being generated on these lower class roads - or any road with POI’s to stop at.
I have offered several suggestions in the forums for Waze to better filter out false jams. But is seems that they are not yet concerned with it. So the only reasonable option at this time is to educate other Wazers to turn Waze off when they are stopped at a POI.
Waze has offered up other solutions to this issue such as mapping Parking Lot Roads and Parking Lot Landmarks which suppress jams when a Wazer is within these map elements. But it is unreasonable for the map editors to landmark every single square inch of POI’s and Parking Lots that adjoin every road world-wide. Stupid actually… Waze needs to improve their logic and fix this problem in other ways.
Also understand, that waze only shows higher than normal traffic. Which is a different model from the highway sensor style traffic alerts from other companies.
So if the traffic level is normal (always bad ) then their might not be a traffic alert, as the real speed and average speed for that time of day are close. That is why it is recommended to use navigation, as the routing server is supposed to take into account historical averages, and real time data from other wazers for routing. If their is enough data for faster alternatives, then navigation will try to take those into account, and route around the “normal” traffic, without the need for an “alert”.
“Drive what you see” unfortunately is not the best method to use with this product.
Very good point! Since many competitors do not support re-routing when traffic changes when on a route, the user is accustomed to scanning the map, and manually adjusting the route. Most humans cannot accurately calculate the fastest route in this way since there are so many variables.
This is really the power and benefit of Waze. If it’s working as designed, you should set a route and trust that Waze is taking you the fastest (or shortest depending on your client setting) way which factors in traffic. You should not have to be concerned with having to manually adjust your route based on the traffic jam speeds or color coding.
There’s a road not close to where live always have indication of slow traffic but more than 90% of the time there is no traffic. I wonder if it’s caused by someone have it running without driving…
It depends on a lot of factors - some of which we don’t understand fully since we are users of the system, not the developers. If the traffic jam is moving at 40mph and the average speed of that segment at that time of day is 40mph, Waze may not show it as a jam - even though the posted speed limit may be 65 mph. So to you, it’s a traffic jam. But to Waze, it’s not a jam since the traffic speed is the same as the time of day average.
Waze is analyzing the traffic of each segment as mapped. If you report traffic, Waze has stated that it gives double weight to a jam being created on that segment. But as you say, the double weighting seems to only be relevant to the segment where you placed the report. So if you commonly run into situations where adjacent segments don’t update with the jam (may not update until several minutes later), try doing a manual report on each segment. Of course you should not have to place any manual reports since Waze should be doing all of this automatically…
Maybe its really associated to the speed waze has set in cartouche. Is there a way to set those speeds to actual road speed limits? Maybe waze is not showing slow roads because the real road speed is low and since its low and the traffic is slow, to waze, there is no jam.
As long as we have Wazers driving through at (nearly) all hours of the day, Waze knows what the speeds could/should be. If it isn’t taking the actual max road speed when calculating a jam notification, it should be.
Thats a problem then. We should be able to set the max speed of the road. With jams, people driving so slow and lot of data that corresponds to wrong road speed, that average will never go up.
But the point still stands: just because traffic moves at 1/2 the speed limit for two-hours on specific segments during the evening doesn’t mean, IMO, that Waze should consider that normal and not report a slowdown.
IMHO, it should consider that normal and should not report a slowdown. I find the Google traffic maps that have all highways here marked red during the rush to be most unhelpful. What’s the point of alerting me to a fact I already know, that the traffic is slow when it always slow during the rush.
I’m not sure I agree, actually. But beyond that, if it considers that a road is running at its normal speed which is 1/2 the speed limit, is this affecting traffic avoidance? As I type this, I’m thinking “it shouldn’t” and “I hope not” because traffic avoidance should still be based on transit times compared to alternate routes.
I can confirm that Waze ETA is affected by areas that are frequently jammed with traffic - whether or not there is a jam on the display. I notice this when there is a holiday and I can beat the ETA to my work by several minutes. Generally I can rarely beat the initial ETA on my daily commute.
Of course Waze has no concept of the speed limit - only the average speeds. But I understand what you are saying - if the average speed of a segment is 30 MPH at 8am and 65 MPH at noon that the slower average speed is due to traffic.
So in order for Waze to show a jam on a segment that has an average speed of 30 MPH at 8am, when the traffic is flowing at 30 MPH on a particular day they likely will have to modify their jam algorithm to also compare against average speeds at other times of the day. Likely this would really complicate their jam algorithm (and probably going to introduce other bugs…).
Are you a programmer? Of course it’s hard to do, since they probably have some sort of public interface being used, and adding in a max speed data requires a (if written in Java, for example) new Class (they might be able to cheat it by making max speed an instance variable of an existing class, which will still require updating anything interacting with that variable, and in turn, anything interacting with that Class), with new methods, and a new interface, along with changing the existing classes, methods, and interfaces to adapt to this new class.
Depending on how integrated (and large) the code is (and how poorly designed it was), it could require dozens of hours to add. Then there will be bugs.
It’s something that should eventually be implemented, but not now.
EDIT:
It’s always simple when we write it out on paper (who would honestly think that adding one more value could potentially take hours), but then again, as my teacher said, the stupidest thing in this room is the computer
The hardest one we already have that its the average aquired by the client. Adding a Max speed in database is simple since it will be done by the editor and is just another data field that you will add to waze road registers. I dont know how is waze algorithm but instead of comparing just with the average, using existing methods “and” maxspeed shouldnt be difficult.
That horse is already dead. Please don’t try to resurrect it. Any attempt to add a “speed limit” to segments is doomed to be wrong often enough to be effectively worthless, does zero to help traffic avoidance, and just heaps more work onto the community editors.
) then their might not be a traffic alert, as the real speed and average speed for that time of day are close. That is why it is recommended to use navigation, as the routing server is supposed to take into account historical averages, and real time data from other wazers for routing. If their is enough data for faster alternatives, then navigation will try to take those into account, and route around the “normal” traffic, without the need for an “alert”.